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Best practices to follow for a secure mobile application development

According to research studies mobile security breach could happen at 3 layers.

1. Device Layer.

2. Network Layer.

3. Data Center.

Mobile applications that are developed on any given mobile platform have their data that is not secured. The reasons could be a weak encryption data that would easily compromise for an attack. The bugs within the apps’ secure socket layer or a configuration manipulation could all sum up to security breach and access to mobile data. In order to seal the unauthorized entries into the mobile devices here are the few fundamental thumb rules to be followed voluntarily before an app is released to the app market.

Ensure the safety of sensitive data:

Sensitive data on an application is prone to high risk and as a remedy it is better not to have this high sensitive data at all.

A proper encryption of data is just a means of having the hacker delay his reach out to the data. A fool proof encryption is not the practical parameter to safeguard the sensitive data. Thus, developers should think ‘Out of the box’ to strengthen the encryption to leave the hacker impatient to crack an entry.

Give no option to cache app data:

Data as in case of web apps or mobile apps could be left unnoticed in cookies, web history, web cache, files, and log/debug files and in many other spots where the hacker can be welcomed to trespass into the mobile device. This option of clearing all the possible places containing cache data will leave the unauthorized person from viewing or manipulating mobile data.

Let the crash logs not be the betrayer:

A crash log reporting could pave way to the hacker due to the information that it contains. Primarily, ample testing iterations have to be conducted to ensure a stable app with no scenario of crashing so that the crash log is never in the picture at all. It is therefore a high priority of making a note of the crash logs not to contain sensitive data or would show a path to the hacker into the app.

Production build should not have debug logs:

Similar to the crash logs, debug logs too having data that will be of utmost use to the hacker. It will be ideal for the developer to disable NSLog statements for an iOS app. The android system log the circular logs containing sensitive data must to be cleared in order to protect the critical data. These two solutions on the leading platforms can be very useful to the developer fraternity.

Data like account numbers must be hidden and instead tokens must be accepted:

It is common to have the account numbers to be used as a reference server side account data. The token numbers substituting the account numbers are more appropriate as it is not deducible by the denied person. Hence, even with the application data being stolen or compromised the user’s account numbers will not be exposed, and an attacker will also not be able to reference account numbers directly, but must first determine the token that maps back to the account.